


Associate Benefits (Part Five of Five)

by mresundance



Series: Associate Benefits (Libs AU) [5]
Category: AU - Fandom, The Libertines
Genre: AU, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-06
Updated: 2010-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-11 13:24:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/112872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mresundance/pseuds/mresundance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU in which Peter and Carl work retail; Peter and Carl finally sort some things out. Still a bit more angst. Dammit!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Associate Benefits (Part Five of Five)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Don't know 'em. Dirty lies of a bored mind.

**Quadrangles**  
Peter was crouched in the handicapped stall and his lunch-break had ended awhile back, he didn't remember, he didn't entirely care. He was trying to think. He wondered if Ewan McGregor could apply his own mascara after _Velvet Goldmine_? Peter's head felt like it had been pinched off, courtesy of some giant thumb and forefinger of the universe. He imagined his head drifting around, somewhere, in the ether of space maybe, bleeding out all of Peter's goblins and demons and ghouls through the neck. Words and thoughts floated away from him and pranced just out of reach. They were mockingbird words, he thought, cawing and flapping, sounds that were just like schoolboy jibes.

You fancy Ca-aaarl, you fancy Caaarl, la-lala-la-laaa!

Accompanied with all the necessary tongue acrobatics that children will indulge in when tormenting a peer.

Peter cupped his face in his hands and sighed. He did – fancy Carl – terribly. And Carl probably fancied him, if the impromptu snoggage a week gone was any indication. But Carl also fancied Annalisa just as Peter also fancied Kate.

Ah, there's the rub. It was like those stories that were told with four fingers and a strand of yarn woven skillfully between them, only either the fingers or the yarn had malfunctioned and now it had all gone to shit. It was so tangled that not even Jeanette, who had a strange obsession with period jewelry that had landed her a job in the jewelry department and was renowned for her ability to untangle the impossible to untangle tangled chains could untangle it. Peter blinked and went over this analogy a few more times because it was confusing. Peter needed scissors. He could at least trim the knot, right?

He shook his head. This was why he was wondering useless things, pointless things, anything to keep his mind away from . . . the other things. Things like, if Beethoven hadn't lost his hearing, would he have written such great music, because did the not-hearing spur him to greater heights of genius or something? And did Beethoven do his own hair? Or could Ewan McGregor apply his own mascara after _Velvet Goldmine_? Peter could apply his own mascara. He could even paint his toenails and fingernails, like he had the other night.

Oh bugger. Peter cringed as someone next to him flushed and washed their hands (actually washed their hands . . . a novelty . . . ). His mind was a minefield and he had just stepped onto another mine. Memory exploded and he was thinking again about his last date with Kate.

It had been a lovely date. Lila had been whisked off, with the minimum of complaints and threats to Peter's person, to her mate's house for a sleepover. Peter and Kate had found themselves utterly alone. Peter had been relieved Lila was gone. On top of the usual theatrics, Lila had taken to calling him at home and breathing heavily and ominously (in a seven year old way) into the phone receiver. Sometimes she would say things in a low growling voice, such as: "You'd better stay away from mommy. Or else," and hang up. He was tempted to tell Kate she – or someone – let her impressionable young child watch too many mafia type movies, but then he would have to explain the phone-calls and how she terrified him the way only a seven year old could terrify an adult. You never knew what was going on in that wee child brain, for one thing. She could be bullying one minute and then burst into catastrophic tears the next for no reason. She was unpredictable. That, and, ratting out a seven year old would've made him an insensitive arsehat. As the daughter, she held all the cards and somewhere in that little mind she _knew_ it. He had to play somewhat by Lila's rules then, even if they were mutable according to seven year old whims and didn't involve consistency or much proper spelling.

Peter and Kate had spent the night in, indulging in take-away kebabs and pizza and some pints from the local pub. There were fantastically circular conversations about philosophy and ancient Greece. There was toenail painting during which Kate had giggled (really giggled!) and said she had never had a boyfriend who would not only paint her toenails, but his own. _Boyfriend_. The word more potent than any drugs Peter had tried over the years, shooting straight to his head and he gone floating around on some kind of fluffy golden cloud of _oh, how I adore her_.

After toenail painting, she had turned, and, gifted him with a steady gaze that he read as longing. He had followed her into her bedroom and let her lay him down on the bed. He had let her take off their clothes and kiss him all over, sensitive, feathery kisses that made him fill up with tears. He had thought of Carl and wished, yes, just for a second, yes, please, if only he would kiss me like that, like I might break. They had dived under the covers and spent the next hour reveling in the feel of each other's skin and warmth, sighing and laughing quietly. Running his palms down her soft, hot back, her hands – small and fine boned, not like Carl's broad paws - crawling up and down his spine and feeling her shudder in his arms, feeling his own body shiver in return. Kissing, touching, exploring.

He had laid on his back and known he was a betrayer of the worst kind, some kind of turncoat of his own heart, of Kate's trust. And of Carl. The golden haze had vanished and he was left in the dark with this woman who he just only knew.

Kate had rolled over, propping her elbow in the bed and her chin her palm. She had peered at him in the shadowy light for a minute and Peter wondered if she knew how guilty he was.

"Wot?" he had said.

"Peter . . . are you . . . a good man?" She hesitated with the question. Maybe because it was a rubbish question. Carl would never ask a question like that. What kind of question was that?

Usually it would be the kind of question Peter delighted in. Romp around with. The kind of question that had answers that shot off in four, five different directions. Sure, he could've said. Essentially, I am a good man. Overall. Or, if you ask my parents, I am essentially a terrible disappointment and failure. Can't stay in school (too boring!) can't keep a steady job (boring!), can't do anything much but fuck up. He could've nudged away the speed he had in his sock drawer and how his mattress was stained and sagged from nights of indulgence. He could've pointed out that he was willing to do anything for her and Lila, but that would be words mouthed and not actually true. Faking it. He could've said: I am too complicated for that and it's not a matter of bad or good, but what parts of me decide to show themselves at any given time.

The problem was that those wouldn't be the answers Kate wanted because that really wasn't the question she had asked, Peter fretted still, worrying at a thumbnail and hoping Alan wouldn't come storming in any second to grab him by the scruff and demand why the hell he had been missing from the floor . . . however long he had been missing.

What she had really been asking, he sensed, was if he was good enough for her and Lila. Was he worth it? Was he a viable future? Stable, honest, caring, a sort decent enough to pass muster?

And she had had the right to ask; she had the right as a mother and a woman to protect her child from a wobbly character, and, to protect herself. (Even if that child ended up being like the Godfather – er Godmother - and going to the mattresses and leaving bloody horse-heads in people's beds and got Sofia Coppola killed and whatnot . . . Peter chuckled.)

He had asked himself the same things, but hadn't really dwelled on it because the answers – the real honest answers – would bother him.

"Peter?" Kate had held his chin.

"Uhm . . ." Peter had begun.  


*

  
Carl wasn't working. He should've been arranging some slippers in the aisle, but instead, he had wandered off to the Junior's department again to find Annalisa. He just wanted to fuck Annalisa, which made him an asshole of a pretty high order, right after the assholes who really believed women were just objects to be used for their own pleasure and chucked aside like used tissues. He knew Annalisa deserved better; he just didn't have the energy to care anymore. He wanted to devote every iota of his sad being to fucking and not thinking about other things. He wanted to lose himself in some exhausted, slippery, sexed out oblivion. It was comfortable – familiar – there, at least. He had tried to stay there all week and it wasn't entirely working as well as planned. For one thing, Annalisa had her own opinions on the use of her body, and it didn't necessarily always involve Carl whenever Carl felt like it. Which meant Carl had developed a rather sore wrist over the past few days. For another, Carl had been grinding into her one evening after work, and they both had been grunting and moaning and having a good time of it, until Carl had nearly let Peter's name fall from his lips. He had modified it to a sort of "Pe-please aaaah" but Annalisa had still given him a raised eyebrow and Carl had notably not come and Annalisa had had to finish up solo. She had been cranky about it but Carl, Carl had kept away from her and buried himself in apathy and blankets and claimed he had a headache when she tried to reach for him.

"Hi," he said to Annalisa by way of foreplay when he found her hovering around the dressing room. She gave him a look that was midway between exasperated and wary.

"What now?" she said, hands on hips. Was this going to mean no sex?

"Uhm. Er. How about . . ." he inched towards the dressing room, trying to do his Sex on Legs impersonation but failing because she was looking at him the same way his mother would look at him when he was being a first class prat.

Annalisa crossed her arms and there was a smile there, but he sensed it wasn't the happy kind.

"Carl," she said. "What's the matter with you? You've been . . . odd . . . all week."

"Well uhm, I uhm," Carl explained. "I uhm. Really like you and just want to spend time with you."

That sounded okay unless he thought of it from her point of view, in which case, he might as well have just shot himself in the foot.

Anna gave him a scathing look.

"You just want to have sex. All you want to do, is have sex. There is no sitting around watching telly or going to the cinema just to enjoy the popcorn and the film. There is no little dates with sweet kisses and certainly no just enjoying a nice WALK IN THE PARK HOLDING HANDS LIKE NORMAL DATING HOMO SAPIENS –" she started to shrill and Carl put his finger to his lips and tried to indicate that maybe being quieter would be good because then random customers and other employees wouldn't be ogling them. Vaguely, somewhere, too, Carl thought, hey, those are the gripes _I_ had with _you_ not so long ago.

"DON'T YOU 'SSSSH' ME CARLOS ASHELY RAPHAEL BARÂT." Gemma was in earshot and cackled and Carl knew he wasn't going to hear the end of the "Ashley Raphael" parts of his name until Christmas. "DON'T YOU 'SSSSH' ME. I HAVE BEEN ALTOGETHER TOO PATIENT WITH YOU THIS WHOLE TIME, AND IT WAS NICE AT THE BEGINNING BUT NOW YOU ARE JUST A SAD, SOPPY CREATURE WHO I SUSPECT IS HUNG UP ON A CERTAIN PETER. I HEAR RUMORS AND I SEE HOW YOU TWO ACT AROUND EACH OTHER LIKE A PAIR OF – WELL – LOVESICK DOLTS. DON'T THINK I CAN'T PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER. I AM NOT STUPID I AM NOT DAFT AND I AM NOT SOME – THING - YOU CAN USE TO IGNORE YOUR OWN – EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS!"

"Okay . . ." Carl said at length when a stiff silence had settled around them.

"Go away Carl. I can't talk to you now. Go away. We're done." Annalisa started slapping shirts on her workstation and folding them.

"What?" Carl said.

"We're done, as in not seeing each other, as in, I am throwing your toothbrush and your greasy socks out and not having to put up with your bellyaching and drinking whisky and ignoring me and watching 'Battleship Galacticar –' "

"Battle_star_ Galactic_a_ –" he corrected. "With Edward James Olmos and Mary –"

"Whatever. Leave me alone and go off and go. Away."

Looking at her, folding shirts and trying very hard not to cry, Carl felt like Scum with a capital S. The UN should have him on their list of people known for human rights abuses kind of Scum. It was as simple as he was wrong, utterly wrong, and she was right, painfully right. He paused for a minute and mumbled a "sorry" before retreating.

 

**Electromagnetism**  
Peter had left the stall long enough to drink a mouthful of water from the sink and return to gargle "God Save the Queen" when he heard the bathroom door slam open and a familiar voice swearing. He looked under the stall and saw Carl's shoes coming straight for him.

Carl banged on the stall.

"Whoever you are, please hurry up!"

Peter was humored Carl remembered the please, just in case he happened to be a customer. Peter gargled and swallowed and finally said: "It's me."

Silence in which they could hear the pages and some bloke arguing about his return at customer service.

"Get the hell out of the stall. I need it. I have – rights of duress!" Carl sputtered to the beige painted metal door.

"Bullshit," Peter said. "You are just making up rules about use of the handicapped stall."

"You've been in there for two hours! Anthony has been looking for you to give him his lunch break!" Carl snapped.

"Well, if you're in such duress you need to not be alone. You need a mate to . . . stick around with you." Both of them could hear the gears practically whirring in Peter's brain.

"Fuck no. You're not my mate," Carl started to say when Peter swung open the door. He leaned casually against the doorframe and looked at Carl. It was a Worried About You sort of look that squeezed Carl's already bruised heart.

"Alright, fine."

He shouldered past Peter, but took a little longer than necessary in doing so.

They were quiet together for awhile, sticking to opposite walls and studiously observing the beige tiles. Peter's name kept being paged but Peter ignored it and Carl just wanted to go the fuck home.

"Annalisa broke up with me," Carl admitted and it hurt like throwing up.

Peter opened and closed his mouth and kept himself from saying something stupid like, oh, peachy!, because Carl would clearly deck him for it.

"I'm . . . sorry. Carl."

Carl kicked the tiles and stuffed his fists in his pockets.

"Yeah. I was being a. Bastard. I guess," he shrugged. He was not going to cry. He had already cried on Peter for reasons he still couldn't suss out, but mostly, he thought, it had to do with just – it was like magnets. Peter had once explained that scientists didn't know everything about electromagnetism, but there was something about strong nuclear forces and weak nuclear forces . . . anyways, the point was, that atoms had charges and some were positive and some were negative and positives liked negatives but repelled positives which is how you got magnetism. And every atom in Carl's being was busy, perhaps had always been busy, wanting to glue themselves to every atom in Peter's being. Being glued there had made him delirious and happy and confused.

While Carl was thinking about atoms and steam was practically billowing out of his ears, Peter said: "I broke up with Kate."

"What? Sorry?" Carl surfaced from his ponderings on psychics as it pertained to the behavior of atoms. Certainly he was hallucinating. Because Peter adored Kate and had rattled on and on about . . . marrying her . . . they were going to have more kids and a dog and a white picket fence and . . . stuff.

"I broke up with Kate," Peter repeated. And saying the words was like chucking off an over-burdened backpack and feeling one's muscles ripple as one's back straightened again. He could breath easy again and was – grinning. Carl thought Peter had finally lost it.

"What?" Carl said again, considering escape routes.

"I broke up with her the other night. I. She asked me. Well, she asked a stupid question but she was, worried, you know? And I told her the truth," he sighed. He had fucking _wings_.

"The truth?" said Carl.

"You know," Peter shrugged.

The truth he had chosen to tell her wasn't that he was mad about Carl. It was that, essentially, he was not the decent upstanding bloke she was looking for. He had bad habits like drugs and drink and chaotic nights out he wasn't going to abandon for a little while yet. If left alone to take care of Lila, he would probably forget she existed and she'd jump down a flight of stairs and break her leg or set something on fire and he'd be none the wiser. Oh, and he was a bit scummy and unkept, mostly. Not something to bring home to mum, especially as a stepfather and son-in-law-to-be. The sight of Peter Doherty at the door, proposing to marry one's daughter (or son, these days), even Peter knew, would prompt a fount of tears and laments like: "Why God, why?"

Well, except someone like – Carl's - mother, but that's because she was Carl's mother and believed in things like hypnotism therapy and dancing with fairies on Midsummer's eve and sent Carl packages with Chinese cough syrup that had "snake gall" in it.

"What are you doing?" Peter asked when he noticed Carl was trying to defy gravity and slippery metal walls.

"I'm climbing the wall," Carl said matter of factly. It seemed logical, but then, Prince Charles as King would also have seemed logical to Carl at this point. "I'm escaping."

"Why?"

"You're mad."

"Alright."

"You know Carl, I don't think it ends like this," he said after a minute.

"You don't?"

"No. If this were some kind of story, I don't think the readers have just sat on their arse for all this time procrastinating on various other useful activities in life just to have you bugger off and that be the sad tragic end, if you catch my meaning."

Carl looked down at Peter. The thing about magnetism, Carl remembered Peter babbling – the whole atoms thing – was that it was one of the four reasons that things in the universe worked the way they did. It was a fact of life if life ever had facts. It was bigger than him. The moon didn't move because it was held in thrall by earth's gravity. And the earth stayed right where it was partially because of the minute push and tug of the moon's gravity. Carl might as well accept it. He slid back down to earth with Peter and Peter's bemused grin.

"You're strange," Peter said.

"Yeah," said Carl.

The embrace was the timid we don't know what to do next kind of affair, but it was soft, it was warm. Peter held Carl and kissed him a little until Carl told him to stop because he just wanted to be held, he wasn't up for anything else. That was fine with Peter.

 

**Epilogue**  
There were other versions of this story. They happened on days when the author was feeling like subverting the fandom and the OTP and letting the boys run off with the women for once. In another version, Annalisa and Carl made up and stayed together and were quiet happy in spite of his occasional depressive funks over the hard knocks in life. His mother would be known to pop by Annalisa's myspace and niggle about when she would see ridiculously pretty grandchildren. Kate and Peter did get married, or planned to. The question of the 2.5 children and white picket fence and dog still remains to be seen in some cases, though, rumor has it there is a lovely ring courtesy of a visit to Florence.

In other versions they didn't meet Kate and Annalisa until much later, after they had quit retail when they discovered they had a talent for music and were busy trying to put together a record, helpfully managed by Banny.

In yet other versions they stayed together through thick and thin and 'til death do you part sort of thing, but were always mum about the actual nature of their relationship, falling back into "oh, best friends" until the media and the fans turned blue in the face and just stopped listening because clearly they were lying a lot.

In other versions they broke up and didn't really cross paths again. In another they did but they were old men, content to wile away their last years together adoring each other through the lens of memory.

The possibilities splinter out and out and out and on and on and on. There's plenty to choose from if this ending does not satisfy.   


*

  
"Oh rubbish, they wanted me to come in to work," Carl hung up the phone and rolled back into Peter. Peter was sitting in Carl's bed, hair post-coitally agog, reading _Critical Theory Since 1965_, an enormous tome Carl had bought for university once, but, since giving up on university, had been using as a doorstop.

"Oh yeah?" Peter said. "They'll be calling me next. Whining, 'oh Peter, please come and save us from our bad scheduling and not scheduling enough people on a busy weekend'! You think the managers could figure something so simple out."

Carl agreed and put his face in Peter's stomach. The minute scratch of Carl's stubble against his skin had Peter shivering appreciatively.

It had been a few weeks before they had become official, and a month before he would let Peter touch him affectionately in public, but it was good. They still got up to the usual at work, still screamed at by Alan, but then got to spend their days off together at the cinema, or watching telly and talking about nothing, or holding hands in the park and flipping off the kids who called them "queers" and "poofs". And sex, but that wasn't the only thing. It was like the pudding and the rest had become the main course. Or the Yorkshire pudding that came before the roast beef. Something.

"When do you work next?" Carl said to Peter's stomach.

"Friday, I think. You work then too, don't you?"

"Yeah. In. Shoes." Carl pulled his face out of Peter's stomach and waggled a suggestive eyebrow.

"Hmmmm," said Peter, turning a page. "You think laces are good for trussing a person up?"

"We should find out," Carl said. "You know. In case. Customers want to know."

"Sounds like an excellent idea to me," Peter said.


End file.
